Transcript
MCCORD: Let us worship God. Let us pray. O God, our Father, who through Thy Holy Spirit does illuminate the minds and sanctify the lives of those who Thou dost call to the work of pastors and teachers. Look with Thy favor upon all schools for the instruction and discipline of those who are to serve in the sacred ministry of Thy church.
Bless those who teach and those who learn, that they may apply themselves with such diligence to the knowledge which is able to make men wise onto salvation, and submit themselves with such ready obedience to the Lord, Thy Son, Our Savior, that they may fulfill their ministry with joy. Through Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Lord. Amen.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Amen.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 2: A Scripture lesson for this service this evening is from the first chapter of Paul's letter to the Galatians. "Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, through the saints and faithful brethren in Christ at Colosse, grace to you and peace from God our Father. We always
thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ when we pray for you because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love which you have for all the saints. May you be strengthened with all power according to His glorious might for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in life.
He has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the Kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions
or principalities or authorities, all things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all things and in Him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn, from the dead. That in everything He might be preeminent, for in Him all the fullness
of God was pleased and well, and through Him to reconcile for Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross." Here ends the Scripture lesson for the evening.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: Upon recommendation of the faculty and president of Princeton Theological Seminary, the board of trustees has elected Dr. Johan Christiaan Beker, Professor of biblical theology and Dr. Bertil Edgar Gärtner, Professor of New Testament in this institution. The election has been confirmed
by the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church of the United States of America. You will now give answer to the following questions which the plan of the Seminary requires be put to every person who is inaugurated into a professorship. Do you believe in one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and do you confess anew
the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord and acknowledge Him over all things to the church which is His body?
UNISON: I do.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: Do you accept the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the church (inaudible) and by the Holy Spirit God's Word to you?
UNISON: I do.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: Will you perform the duties of a professor in this Seminary in obedience with Jesus Christ under the authority of the Scripture?
UNISON: I do.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: Do you approve of the government and discipline of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America?
UNISON: I do.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: Have you been induced, as far as you know your own hearts, to accept the call to the office into which you are now being inducted with a sincere desire to promote the glory of God and the gospel of His Son?
UNISON: I do.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: Are you willing to undertake the work of a professor in this seminary and do you promise to discharge the duties which are incumbent on you in this character, as God shall give you strength?
UNISON: I do.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 3: And now I ask that you affix your name to this book which contains the signatures of all those who have been inaugurated into professorships throughout the 156 years of the institution's history.
Almighty God, who art the Lord of heaven and of all the earth, by whom all things good are made and in whose service there is perfect freedom, we thank Thee for the privilege of work and witness in the mission of Thy Kingdom. We thank Thee for the community of
the people of God and for the diversity of vocations into which the claim of Thy gospel has led us. We stand in wonder before the riches of mind and heart which our Christian heritage has given us, and we yearn to make more and more of our [home?] that harvest of thought in service and witness that has become part of the annals of Thy church.
Thou art the source of all truth and might, and blessed be Thy name forever and ever. O, Thou who has called us to this hour in the light of this Seminary and in the career of Thy service, who now pledge their devotions to the office of teaching and ministering in these crucial days, give them we pray Thee ready minds and obedient wills
in order that Thy word may dwell in them richly and through them instruct us in all wisdom. Grant each of them so to learn of Thee that Thy faith, that our faith in Thy [community?] and our hope in Thy promises and our love to all men may be renewed and enlarged in each student generation. Accept now
the dedication of their hearts and the promise of our support and comradeship in the ever-expanding search for truth. Grant us grace to use our gifts for Thy eternal glory and for the lasting good of all mankind through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
AUDIENCE: Amen.
MCCORD: At this point in the service of installation, I should like to extend a hearty welcome to the representatives and delegates from sister institutions who have done us the great service of being represented here through your presence and through your participation in this service. I should like to extend to you,
to the other guests, the faculty, and students, an invitation to attend the reception in the campus center after this service of installation has concluded. There you will have an opportunity to extend greetings and congratulations to Professors Beker and Gärtner. My dear colleagues and friends,
you have now officially joined that privileged group of professors known today as prophets on tenure. And you have an opportunity now to teach officially students, known as revolutionaries on scholarships.
We assemble as members of this community on many occasions throughout the year, most often in Miller Chapel. But I daresay there is no [occasion?] of more far-reaching significance than this one
in which two distinguished scholars and dedicated teachers are being officially inducted into professorships. Tonight marks the first time, at least as far as my research informs me, the first time in the 156-year history of Princeton Seminary that a non-Presbyterian is being installed
as a professor. Some of you who know our colleagues may want to challenge this, but I'm speaking for them. The Seminary faculty has been enriched from time to time by scholars from other traditions, but heretofore it has been the rule of the Seminary and of the General Assembly that a professor installed must be a member of the United Presbyterian
Church. Two years ago the board of trustees requested that this rule be relaxed, and last year both of you were unanimously confirmed to your positions by the General Assembly. Tonight therefore marks what I believe is a significant step forward in ecumenical reality. Tonight I can express for all of us gratitude
to two great [traditions?] of biblical scholarship, one coming from the Netherlands and the other from Sweden, for their contributions to the enrichment and deepening of the intellectual life of this faculty and of American Christianity. This occasion is significant, too, in that both professors are being installed in posts
in the New Testament field. You have come to us at a time when old structures are eroding, old systems are under attack, and when there is a fresh appreciation for New Testament Christianity and a desire to recover the vitality and flexibility of the New Testament church. I hope that you will be instruments in that recovery of
the flexibility and vitality of the church that we find in the New Testament pages. It is my duty to deliver a brief charge, with two addresses to follow, inevitably it will be brief. Appointment to a professorship at Princeton Seminary is one of the highest academic and ecclesiastical honors that can come to a man. This is not to say that you
have now received an honorary position. It represents years of achievement and is public recognition on the part of your peers and of the board of trustees of your scholarly abilities and Christian commitment. It is a testimony to two careers that have already achieved distinction. You have brought new excitement to your discipline and you have brought new
excitement to this campus. It is my earnest hope that you will find conditions here that are conducive to the best scholarship and that will be a constant stimulus to you as you continue your research and teaching. You are a part of one of the great intellectual centers of the world, where university, science, and industry have concentrated their research. You represent the commitment
of the church to knowledge, in the midst of this center, and you are a part of it and a part of the church's decision not only to seek the truth but also to follow it wherever it may lead. Let me conclude by saying a word about the duties of a professor. He is ordained by the church's ministry, having been called by the church to a specific task. His ministry is to
be performed primarily here at the Seminary, and he should be able to find his satisfaction and fulfillment in the pursuit of this calling. You will note that I have put ministry first, for it is the Seminary's purpose to train the church's ministry. The founders of Princeton believed that religion without learning or learning without religion in the ministers of the gospel must ultimately prove
injurious to the church. You are therefore responsible for helping maintain the highest intellectual standards along with the deepest commitment to Him who is the truth as well as the life and the way. Professors also are responsible for another task, that of enabling the church to understand with ever-growing clarity her true nature, her message, and her mission.
To do this you must publish the books that will be read by the church, that will form and reform the church's mind. The obligation to research and to publication is laid up on every professor who is inducted into office. Already you are fulfilling this obligation, and you will, I'm confident, continue to do so with distinction. With your other colleagues I salute
you tonight and pray that God will give you the grace and the courage to bear witness to the lordship of Jesus Christ over all reality, through your own fidelity to your vocation as scholars and teachers of the church.
(music)
BEKER: There are types of confusion. Ours is no longer a nihilistic confusion, personal despair in the face of death. Ours is a confusion of too much rather than too little. There are so many possibilities, too many.
Indeed, we rejoice in a new sense of freedom, freedom from all the heteronomies which bound us in the past and to the past and which still chain our fathers, in our opinion, and we are determined to establish ourselves as men of sober integrity, men with a new sense of autonomy, men who truly belong to a
mankind come of age. All this is possible, but our too many possibilities of explicating reality turn in on us, and they erode commitment. Possibility may be our new idol, and the life of non-commitment our new possibility. For Hegel the real was the rational, for us the real
is the relative. The possibility syndrome produces our identity crisis so that it becomes increasingly rare to meet students with a mature sense of vocation and commitment. Now theology shares the confusion of our time. We no longer know what it means to do theology or what a proper curriculum should look like or how
to schematize an orderly flow of theological disciplines. And it is good that theology should share the confusion of our time, for a theology which bypasses this confusion is a timeless theology and thus irrelevant. Unless theology is contemporaneous, it is not. Therefore, a quick panacea for the present confusion of possibilities is beside the point, whether of a fundamentalist, neo-orthodox,
existentialist, or sociological type. A romantic yearning for the eternal verities of dogma or a however sincere lamentation over lost values often confuses thoughtlessness with conviction, whereas a quick existentialist posture of commitment and decision betrays too often the desire to run away from one's actual present and to float in the boundless absurd,
a credo quia absurdum. Our professional eagerness for proclamation is too often an exhibition of spiritual vacuity. It is in this situation then that I am asked to do biblical theology, and in a situation of confusion the easiest thing is to wrap oneself in an academic gown, to simply
withdraw from the world to the isolation of the otherwise-so-necessary library cell. What then shall biblical theology be in our time? Among the different senses biblical theology has employed in the course of time for the interpretation of Scripture -- the literal, allegorical, tropological, etc. -- it too often has neglected common sense. Our time
calls primarily for common sense, a common sense which hopefully avoids the commonplace, so that at least we may clarify our present confusion, detect its components and possible directions. Common sense dictates that whatever biblical theology may be, it is primarily and simply a reflection on the value and possibility of Bible study, intended not for the specialist but for
the average man. This frightfully naïve observation makes us aware of the fact that recent discussions around biblical theology and hermeneutics have become so abstract or so loaded with Germanic linguistic niceties and incomprehensible subtleties that it is no wonder that only phenomenal statisticians and computerized experts can untangle the verbal explosions.
To any but the humorless specialists, it is simply comical that the signs of hermeneutics, promoted to facilitate understanding, has reached a climax of unintelligibility. Common sense also recognizes that the people most responsible for this bedlam are the so-called biblical theologians. Instead of mitigating the
general confusion of our times, they have greatly contributed to it. Who are they actually? What are they about? Are they historians, exegetes, theologians, philosophers, therapeutic agents, cultural analysts, or all of these? It seems that they are neither fish nor fowl. Who amidst the knowledge explosion of our time can less execute a responsible academic function? In the
discussion around hermeneutics, for instance, who is the biblical exegete who can claim philosophical competence in a realm, let us say, of the old versus the new Heidegger, or in the realm of process philosophy, as adequate framework for the biblical message? Cullman's work, for instance, as biblical theologian shows how philosophical-theological naiveté mars his great exegetical skill. Whatever Heilsgeschichte there is in Scripture, it
simply is not a viable modern option. If the knowledge explosion is our common lot, how much more does it affect the biblical theologian who must mediate between biblical research and theology? Who has ever adequately defined biblical theology? When I today accept the chair of biblical theology I am somewhat envious of the solid chair offered to my colleague, a chair of New Testament studies,
a chair which has withstood the centuries. My chair, in comparison, seems a rocking chair, not finding a center of stability but rocking back and forth between Bible studies and theology. Biblical theology after its initial conception by Johann Gabler in the eighteenth century,
as defense against the inroads of dogmatic theology, was redefined by Wilhelm Wrede in the nineteenth century as a purely historical discipline, a definition which Krister Stendahl reaffirms today. However, I suspect that biblical theology became really in vogue with the neo-orthodox movement, but without any clear definition. In fact, although Stauffer came close to a biblical theology in his New Testament theology, and although Miller Burrows produced a book under this title,
a viable biblical theology of Old and New Testament, as such, has never been produced after the work of von Hofmann in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is no small wonder then that the biblical scholar questions the academic integrity of the biblical theologian, suspects him as exegete and fears from him an intrusion not unlike the one Gabler feared from the systematic theologian.
Biblical theology in our recent past was more of a popular slogan than an analytically precise concept. Indeed, a lot of what has gone for biblical theology is simply theological speculation for which the epithet "biblical" must provide respectability. Too often an isolated text is taken out of its context and unambiguously propagated as the central biblical motif.
Too often James Barr's observations on the illegitimate use of Kittel are true. Too often a biblical doctrine of the Spirit, for instance, is artificially created by a mishmash of statements taken from all over Scripture and glued together by some fanciful idea. Too often the New Testament is pressed into relevance, for instance, on social-political questions, bypassing the exegetical evidence
pointing to the essential indifference of the New Testament-apocalyptic community to political and social problems. The understandable eagerness for relevance and some hidden equation of the Bible as the Word of God written -- although not so hidden in the Confession of '67 -- makes some almost metaphysical entity like "The Word of God" the ever-handy,
prepossessed problem solver, whereas it simply overlooks the order of priorities, namely that the New Testament is primarily addressed to first century problems and that to neglect this produces the fallacy of immediacy. A curious lack of historical imagination and honesty often perverts the Bible for the sake of honoring it. The
result is allegorization, a gross reading into Scripture what it cannot support. And so the biblical theologian has enriched the "sloganitis" of theology. Words like kerygma, eschatology, the Word, agape, have lost nearly all precise exegetical meaning and are tossed about to give the biblical theologian some excuse for his existence. What can be said positively? One, the biblical theologian
is primarily an exegete. He is in no sense distinguishable from the biblical scholar except for the fact that he should be as conscious as he can be about his status as a contemporary man, as the bridge builder of the biblical field. As such he can never forget that the written document of the text confronts and is confronted by the living document of the interpreter, the (inaudible). Both documents occupy his
attention and the possibility of mediating between the two is decisive for the "to be or not to be" of biblical theology. The biblical theologian is interested in dialogue, however, he cannot take the dialogue situation for granted. He must face rigorously the romantic implications of the term dialogue itself. Kerygmatic texts tend to be apodictic rather than
invitations for a pastoral counseling session. The continuous conflict between academic historical purity and the convicting insight of faith, between the claims of rationality with their in-built suspension of judgment, their fostering of the relativity of all things, the conflict between this and the claims of commitment to faith and action, indeed, the biblical
theologian must contemplate the possibilities of dialogue and must assist in enabling a dialogue situation to occur. In other words, he must assist in providing the occasion for a happening. Whether such a happening occurs, that is, eventual rejection or acceptance of the biblical message, he must leave to the freedom of God and His Spirit. As a contemporary man who is also a Christian, he can only hope for a happening. In that sense the
dialogue takes place in the context of the church, in the context of the community which sponsors the hope in the happening. At this point many distortions will occur, profound tokens of unbelief. Unbelief, namely, takes the form of monologue in perverting a possible dialogue. Monologue does not allow the text to speak, or it doesn't allow the interpreter to speak. It precludes dialogue either by securing in advance an admission of an
inspired text -- the "hush-up-and-swallow" technique -- or because of a prepossessed conviction that no text will speak unless I amputate it or overload it with ideological weight secured from elsewhere. How little has the possibility of dialogue shaped the execution of commentaries in Scripture? How odd that the most ambitious American commentary ventured, Interpreter's Bible, has raised up not the distinction but a wall
between what it meant and what it means. So that what was supposed to be a dialogue becomes two sometimes clashing monologues, one, that of the historian who maintains his dubious integrity by being unconcerned about the question why he is interested in the text, the other that of the homiletician who at every turn must jeopardize his integrity by blowing edification into text of highly questionable edifying content.
At least, at least Biblischer Kommentar is making a dialogical attempt by the exegete himself in its Ziel sections. Too often biblical scholars disregard the dialogue target and so prevent the conditions necessary for dialogue -- honesty and text concentration. On the one hand we have the eager theologians who are so upset by the nineteenth century
conceptions of honest, so-called dry scholarship that their interpretations of text are often simply fanciful meditations on modern problems with an occasional paraphrase and reference to the biblical text. The hermeneutical language events of Ernest Fuchs and his pupils can never be a substitute for exegetical control. The greatness of Barth's commentary on Romans, for instance, should not blind us to dismiss Julicher's complaints about it
as those of a blind, nineteenth-century liberal. Far too often the strange new world of the Bible is not as strange as Barth would have us believe. No New Testament Christian would have understood resurrection simply to mean Ewigkeit im Nu. On the other hand, the conditions for dialogue are frustrated by the historians. Whereas the theologians just described use the text often as a springboard to jump away from the text at us with their
own ideologies and inspired concoctions, the historians often use the text to jump away from the text in the hinterland of archaeology and the mysterious ramifications of religions-geschichte. In short, they play the game of what Sandmel has so called parallelomania. No one denies the necessity and revelatory character of this hinterland, but hinterland should remain hinterland and not become a
welcome evasion from the demands of the text itself. The target for the biblical theologian is and remains the text itself in its context. Biblical theology today must honestly recognize that no viable solutions has been found to the centuries-old problem of the relation of the Word of God to the words of Scripture, the relation of faith and history. It is Bultmann's merit to have posed the issue -- Geschichte
versus Historie. He has not solved it. In the meantime, dialogue, even though jeopardized, must be attempted. Since the biblical theologian is primarily an exegete who is conscious of the contemporary situation, his function is not systematic, as if there is anything possible like a systematic biblical theology, but his function is critical. Seward Hiltner mentions once the imperialism of the
psychoanalytic movement. In the theological realm it equates, I think, theology with therapy. Now, the recent past has witnessed too much imperialism by the biblical theologian. This is primarily due to the claims of Barth and Bultmann, who tended to equate biblical theology with the theological enterprise as such. The critical function of biblical
theology should be much more modest, namely to see to it to what extent biblical insights can function in the various fields which together constitute the theological enterprise. The function of biblical theology is correlation, not domination. The imperialism of biblical theology in the recent past has created a backlash which now threatens to isolate the Bible from today's theological quest.
Bleak days lie ahead for biblical studies unless biblical theology is willing to come to terms with its own imperialism. In this context the biblical theologian views the present academic theological divisions as anachronistic. It is beyond me why Schleiermacher's model for theological studies is still operative in the clearly interdisciplinary situation of the future. The
Bible cannot operate in an academic vacuum. The insights of Dr. Loder on the learning process indicate that the unique contribution of America to theology lies not in a death of God theology, but lies in a true integration of the so-called practical and content fields. Theology outside the living experience of men becomes merely another ideology. The biblical theologian could richly contribute to heal the so often
divergent tendencies of sociology and psychology by suggesting on biblical grounds that personal therapy can never be separated from the therapeutic social-political context. One sample of the critical function of the biblical theologian could be applied to the theological assessment of revolution.
We are and will be involved in great upheavals. Technological progress seems inevitably to involve dehumanization. The question is not should we be involved or not, we simply are and will be. The question is only how the Christian will be involved. Now with respect to models for revolution, with respect to political and social
strategies, vis-à-vis the establishment and the ideological power structure of the privileged status quo, issues with which Dr. Shaull is courageously concerned, the biblical theologian may possibly ask: one, is the New Testament, to put it in a vulgar and probably outdated language, not essentially a more Freudian than Marxist book? Is the primary focus
of the New Testament not on the enemy within the self rather than on the enemy outside? Is self-transformation not prior to, although not separable from, transforming societal structures? Is it not absurd to attack society purely negatively, with a desire to transform it, as long as the revolutionary nucleus is itself not transformed? Two, the so-called biblical center of
reconciliation may not be as central to the New Testament as recent theology has asserted. Reconciliation must pass through the revolution of the cross, and even apart from biblical insights reconciliation may not be a target word in our time, since a bourgeois affluent church interprets it inevitably as a sanctioning of the status quo. Reconciliation in the race issue has simply been translated as integration,
whereas the church should have recognized that integration which bypasses "Black Power" demands means a resurrection without a cross. Three, has recent reform theology placed so much emphasis on the realized eschatology of cosmic reconciliation that it has overlooked the dualistic components of New Testament
eschatology? Four, has theology not over-hastily rejected the apocalyptic component of the New Testament? Existentialist theology under Bultmann may have Gnosticized the cosmic dimensions of the New Testament, that is, individualized them to such an extent that the theology-is-therapy issue
and an unhealthy health cult became -- against Bultmann's intentions -- inevitable. Five, does perhaps the apocalyptic model of the New Testament give impetus to a model of radical transformation? Is it not to be distinguished from a prophetic theology within history, since the apocalyptic model lives
out of a new creatio ex nihilo, so that apocalyptic models tend toward upheaval rather than progress within given structures? To what extent is this apocalyptic model blunted by Jesus' rejection of zealotism, and what are the alternatives? But above all,
but above all, the biblical theologian is concerned with a critical evaluation of the spirituality of Scripture. Bible reading is becoming increasingly a pious wish today
in a cultural ethos where a word of God, if quested at all, is sought not in Scripture but in the self in dialogue with itself, or in a reading of societal structures and movements. A primary affirmation must be here that the Bible is the book of the church. Luther's Sola Scriptura
must be understood in the context of the church as the reforming principle, so to say, of the tradition and not apart from it in a vacuum. Essentially the Bible is written for believers, not for unbelievers. Its self-authenticating nature in the hands of non-believers is extremely dubious, notwithstanding the many tractates about its
direct relevance and notwithstanding the abstract principle of many Protestant interpreters that the Bible of course is simply one book among other books, but nevertheless authenticates itself as word of God. The Bible is basically the document of the Christian's self-identity. Within our identity crisis it points to the source and origin of Christian self-identity.
Much of the rebellion against Scripture is not due to Scripture but to false expectations of it, to the fallacy of immediacy, immediate relevance. Succinctly, without introduction to biblical books, that is to say without the church explication as to its self-identity as located in Scripture,
the Bible remains a locked book. And yet the church lives by the authority of the Bible, it posits its own creation, the canon, as its creator. Concretely, the witness of Scripture to the Lord of the church, to the risen Lord Jesus, is couched in an imagery so potent and effective that no de-mything can displace it. Time and
again the church experiences that seemingly hopeless anthropomorphisms become the central matrix for religious truth. The post-biblical Protestant can learn here from the joyful renaissance of the Bible in Catholicism today. However, contemporary man finds dialogue with the New Testament
impossible because the dialogical situation seems so limited and the motivation to it absent. Concretely, Old and New Testament piety are concerned basically with questions of unbelief, with false god, false metaphysical options, not with non-belief, that is, with the profound anti-ideological consciousness of men today.
Old and New Testament piety are concerned with hostility to the God of Scripture, not with indifference and skepticism with respect to the church's absolute claims about the God of Scripture which it empirically denies in its practice. Unbelief today desires holy men and holy actions, not holy propaganda
or the ghetto language of the church. And the truth in the students' confusion today is this: they are searching for true models of commitment which they have not found in our collapsing world of the mighty words and the empty deed. And the biblical theologian must recognize that unbelief is not just out there,
but as contemporary man it is within himself. Faith is too often a form of repressed unbelief. No longer, if ever, is the biblical theologian or preacher an answer box. In many ways he is unbeliever in hope. He must recognize that the question of communication and proclamation, the
"how," is dependent on the prior question, the "what," the communication of the Gospel to the self. Luther's Simul iustus ac peccator in our time must mean first of all the willingness to demonstrate in one's own person not the ready answer of the biblical or theological paraphrase, but the struggle of how to become a believer
in the midst of one's own unbelief. For ultimately the irrelevance of New Testament spirituality may be our inability to come to terms with the one central question posed to us by the Bible, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" Through the words "My God" shines the resurrection light and thus the affirmation of life through
death, the peculiar trust that the absence of God is the pledge for his presence. Whoever possesses this secret has found a way, I think, to overcome his identity crisis in the midst of crisis.